Another user/developer banned from GNOME's bugzilla without any warning

And that is the moment someone who knows how to handle such a situation takes his fingers of the keyboard, gets a tea, takes a stroll or does whatever he needs to do to be able to handle the situation rationally later. The others? They behave like a three year old: "I will NEVER play with you again!!!!" and swing the ban hammer.

You have people who don't have English as a first language talking to people.

You have people with varying levels of interpersonal skills - some pretty poor. For example, people with Asperger's can be pretty blunt when talking to others. And they don't always have best modern help to sort that out.

People tend to be protective of work they've done. Especially when it's being "attacked".

And people can be unconstructive in their criticism - "that sucks!" "You're an idiot for doing it like that!"

People can be very attached to certain models.

These combine into a massive clusterfuck. The fact the world runs on so much open source software really is remarkable.

As to fixing this stuff:

1) Create clear divides between technical lists and things that anyone can comment on.

2) Create clear rules about expected behaviour. ("Only technical comments"; "patches get attention, whines don't"; "comment on the code, not the coder"; "polite is good, constructive is essential, flames get you banned".)

2a) Have people to enforces those

3) Have some kind of comment limiting mechanism to prevent flames breaking out. Mostly this is user behaviour, but slowing comments might help to prevent a few flames turning into a forest fire.

4) Have experienced community members acting as mediators. Often flames happen when two people mostly agree with each other but are mis-interpreting a small point, or there are language problems, or some such.

It started somewhere near the top, and the culture's settled in. I've written off the project a long time back.

I mean, on the server side, the worst kind of flamewar I've seen is TJ Holowaychuk disagreeing with Rails defaulting to CoffeeScript. It got us some drama and pictures of cats.

But end-user OSS? That's been a pit of hate and anger ever since Torvalds posted a kernel to some newsgroup.

In fact, it's one of the things that keep me from trying out stuff like Linux for real. If a question like 'which audio driver do i best install?' can only be answered by reading through a multi-year flamewar, why would I bother?

Now, since i've never really tried (or well, not in the past 14 years), the above might be entirely untrue. Still, to me, 'end-user FOSS' and 'hate and anger' are somehow symbolically linked.

Does this make sense? Do people recognise this? Or am I simply a closed-minded fool too fast in his judgment?

I also think that big part of the problem with developer communication comes from the fact that many/most of us taught ourselves how to code when young. That gives you a very high self-pride, as you were doing complicated stuff while your friends were watching DBZ. If you are lucky enough then you find out that you don't know a shit about programming, but that's not always the case.